Mitnick In The News

Has anyone ever seen the internet?

How is the network? How are you? A tangle of cables and some lights? Or is something more abstract? Almost can not live without but have no idea of how we should act. How the hell do they manage to film and TV series?

Has anyone ever seen the internet?

It is the worst contradiction of our time. We live glued to the computer, or smartphone. We communicate by WhatsApp. We work with email. We entertain gossip sadly social networks. I, however, know how greatly these tools. Is exactly the same with the economy, which determines (unfortunately) our life, but it depends on the elements that are beyond the understanding of most of the population, and know why you raise or lower figures , hidden under the enigma of acronyms and names unfriendly as the APR or the Ibex inhabit cyberspace. the economy, such as the internet, you can not touch, but can suffer. Money monster, the last by film as director Jodie Foster , the chronicle of a demagogic presenter of a program on economics kidnapped by a man who has lost his savings and wants to understand why his misfortune, was precisely that.

In an episode of The computer , one of the best comedy series that has television, two computer players decide teased his boss, a woman of computers do not have a clue. They give a black box and tell him what is the internet . She presents the object to a group of people, believing that this will hang a medal. When the computer begins to draw a smile in front of the monumental ridiculous that she should experience ( "That donkey, look who think the internet is a simple box!") Were frozen gesture. The audience, like her, and like everyone else, have no idea how they have internet, something much more sophisticated than a simple black box and tangible . The gag perfectly represents inopia we live. And highlights one of the major challenges of contemporary television and cinema: to represent a virtual world and elusive.

An example of this tour de force is found in a series like Mr. Robot , which meets two seasons and relates the adventures, always in the shade, dirty rooms in improbable and even a little light, an employee of a security company Cyber become hacker . The success of Mr. Robot is not afraid to show a computer screen full of incomprehensible codes. The problem is the insistence to use and intangible elements missing: in this case, a character who inhabits only the imagination of the protagonist , as he passed the anesthetized antihero of The Fight Club , a film for more than a decade that heralded many hobbies and ideas that adopting audiovisual ended.

One of the great challenges of contemporary television and cinema is to represent a virtual world and slippery.

In literature, the authors faced a similar problem. However, many have chosen to analyze and make their own language social networks. This is the case of authors like Tao Lin and called Alt Lit (who plays his label with "Alt" key), which makes the relationship with new technologies in a literary resource. In cinema, we see the latest installment of Jason Bourne began, in fact, a cyber attack. And many films are considered how these new wars when the melee has been replaced by the coldness and distance of Drona. Oliver Stone is about to release his biography of Edward Snowden , a film film that has all the numbers to finish reflecting the problems facing the cinema when to portray a cyber world that can not be captured with a single camera. instead of paying attention to cables and servers, film insists filming what they can not actually see . In the fifth power , the film by Bill Condon who recounted the case of Wikileaks , the virtual world is represented as a real place, a room with tables and chairs. Whenever the film tries to represent internet, the network loses an essential part of what it is: something you can not see or touch. But no, there is no way: television and film reality still need to build their imagination.

Maybe that's why the film and television insist on looking back, about a decade, the eighties, when technology was fascinated but still analog and concrete. This is the case Halt and catch fire , a series that was currently in its third season that began with a team that wanted to compete with IBM in the creation of a personal computer. The Americans , one of the best productions serials current, enters a United States chaired by Reagan and portrays the lives of two Soviet spies who happen to be the perfect American family. the nostalgia invades the screen , and there survives the memory of war, devastating cold which still appears (in fiction) and more specific, known current conflicts. It is no coincidence that, today, James Bond has to deal with an organization so difficult to embrace as Spectre. In this century of ours, everything is intangible, even though the movie you want to put a face and a specific space.

Whenever the film tries to represent internet, the network loses an essential part of what it is: something you can not see or touch.

In early 2000, the television crime story seemed upset by the arrival of CSI , a series in which a team of Las Vegas forensic rebuilt retail crime to meet their makers. The characters of CSI is not a single detail escaped them: not a drop of blood removed thoroughly with bleach or a track erased by rain. Crime always leaves traces, preaching series. Or rather, crime always leaves a physical trace. The success of CSI was accompanied by a withdrawal (s got to tell the authorities feared that criminals could learn to improve their tactics thanks to the series) and became a franchise. Thus was born CSI Miami and another in New York. Finally, last year, was inaugurated CSI cyber , where criminologists trace blood stopped to search a fingerprint rather intangible . A CSI cyber , crime goes through the network announced. Franchising quintessential story of criminal tried to adapt to modern times, in which it is physical disappears. The series, however, could not reflect this paradox in its first episode, recounted the kidnapping of a small child. What this had to do with cyberspace? Just that someone had tampered with the device monitoring the baby. The plot is absolutely absurd because it was still considering the same story of police always, without considering the times have really changed.

A Lo and Behold , the latest documentary by Werner Herzog about the history of the internet, the German director interview hacker Kevin Mitnick, who reveals that any infiltration is possible only thanks to human neglect. The idea is interesting, especially because it returns the network domains of the human being, but especially because it ignores image that unreal film wants to sell Internet and related technologies in a virtual world. We are tired of seeing images, often created by computer, light rays that run on top of cables, figures that move and multiply magically, as if the Internet were still the future, not the reality relentless the time in which we live. A Lo and Behold , the story of the Internet was more tangible (a man had contact with anyone connected to the network in its infancy pointed to some papers ...!) To the mystical. Herzog, an increasingly humanist filmmaker, offers a view down to earth what is internet and how we can put it into images.